Very interesting interview on last night’s Marketplace radio program from American Public Media, an interview with futurist Andrew Zolli of Z + Partners. Zolli talks about the impact of blogs, social networks, peer-to-peer behavior and other online trends as creating a “numerical social cartography” that is having a big impact on marketing by letting (smart) companies track buying trends in explicit detail. He knows of what he speaks (Z + Partners even have a (somewhat neglected) blog of their own), with references to David Sifry’s Technorait and The Virtual Book Tour. Here are some roughly transcribed excerpts:

Retailers and marketers of all kinds are looking around social networks to try to create new forms of economic value. A great example of that is something arranged by an author in California called The Virtual Book Tour…. This one little blog [on the virtual tour] may have 100 readers. Well, that’s just as good as going to Minetonka and doing a reading and doing a reading at the local Borders.
…
The file sharing we generate on the Web…. There’s an oportunity to see people doing that in real time and building maps and networks of their social relationships. So this person who is a friend of this person introduced this song to this social network and it spread this quickly. That’s of unbelievable value. That’s the equivalent of going into that person’s bedroom and saying “I was there when this person made that person a mix tape.”
…
Commercial anthropology is here to stay. It is going to lead to shift in how we think about global marketing. We can get very effective at reaching exactly the right five people. That’s the kind of effect this kind of social cartography has on the wolrd of marketing.

Now that’s what I’m talking about!

Marketplace.org: Internet Trends